Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

I'm just wondering what the intention of the photographer was when he took this photo at an angle. Was it a purposeful attempt to give it that surreal look? Or was he just trying to get in as much light and shadow as possible? Or did he unknowingly bump the camera just before taking the shot?

Ya know, in the 1960's Batman TV series, all of the scenes with the "villains" in them were shot at an angle like this so that the TV viewers knew the people were crooked.

I spend a lot of time in Grand Central and always try to imagine what it felt like to stand in those beautiful beams of light that we see in old photos such as the one on this site. Because of the adjacent buildings, light can't beam in anymore, but thank goodness we have such wonderful photos to enjoy.

Within a year or so after this picture was taken, I saw the magnificence of Grand Central Terminal (and of bustling midtown Manhattan) for the very first time. In fact, that was the time and place where I saw my very first 'celebrity' of those times, in person. It was the comedian Phil Silvers, charging up the staircase that today, still leads to Vanderbilt Avenue.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.